Samcart vs. ClickFunnels – What’s Best? Read BEFORE You Buy

Successful eCommerce businesses must allow customers to purchase multiple items at a time. This means eCommerce shopping carts — or online shopping carts — are essential.

Your eCommerce business cannot succeed without one.

But integrating an online shopping cart into your eCommerce site is only half the battle. In 2019, over 77% of online shoppers abandoned their shopping cart before checking out.

You need to make your online shopping cart equipped with features to combat shopping cart abandonment to increase sales.

Both Samcart and Clickfunnels are two of the best online shopping carts that you can use to mitigate cart abandonment and increase your ROI. But which one is better?

In my Samcart vs. ClickFunnels guide, I take a deep look at both and assess their strengths and weaknesses. So take a look and figure out which one is best for your needs.

SamCart vs. ClickFunnels: Overview

SamCart is a platform that offers online sellers an easy way to start accepting orders—Found in 2014, the software powers over 17,000 businesses worldwide with over 9.7 million products sold.

This direct-to-consumer platform is best for entrepreneurs. It makes it easy for them to launch their pages and sell products without worrying about technology.

It has a simple, user-friendly interface, comprehensive features, and reliable customer service.

SamCart’s full suite of features and ease of use, and reasonable price are some of the reasons why the eCommerce platform continues to grow in popularity.

Some of the key features of SamCart are:

• Mobile Payment Optimization: Unlike many other shopping cart platforms, SamCart supports Google Pay, Apple Pay, and Microsoft Wallet. 
• Sell Physical and Digital Products: One of SamCart’s standout features allows you to sell digital products and physical items.
• Extensive Online Training: SamCart offers a training library and knowledge base filled with training on how you can maximize your sales on the platform. They’ve gone as far as also launching CreatorU as a separate platform to help entrepreneurs learn even more.

SamCart’s interface is intuitive and straightforward. All the features are arranged neatly, and you can easily access them all from the simple drop-down menu. 

As you can see from the image above, the dashboard makes it easy for anyone to get started even when they have no prior knowledge.

ClickFunnels was founded in 2014, and today, it’s one of the most popular all-in-one business platforms available for marketers and product or course developers.

It’s a website and sales builder that makes it easy for entrepreneurs to build high-converting marketing funnels in minutes without having developers. 

The platform takes away the need to deal with many moving pieces, such as building individual pages, integrating a shopping cart, creating an email autoresponder series, setting up a merchant account, and integrating third-party programs for your sales and marketing automation tools.

ClickFunnels offers an intuitive platform; there’s no need to piece together each element yourself, which means you can have complete funnels up and running in minutes – even if you are a complete beginner with no technical knowledge.

Some of the key features of ClickFunnels are:

• All-in-One Tool: ClickFunnels is the perfect tool for marketers who want an easy way to build profitable sales funnels without coding.
• Actionetics: This is ClickFunnels’ unique email program that you can use to manage your email list, create basic emails, and send bulletins to your contacts. This is a great email marketing tool.
• Backpack Affiliate Program: ClickFunnels offers serious affiliate marketers an efficient way to create and manage affiliate programs.

Key Differences

There are some distinct differences between these two platforms, and even though both might be viable options for your business, it’s essential to know where they differ and where each one excels. 

This will help you better decide which platform is best for your business.

Pricing Plans

• SamCart: SamCart costs between $49 and $399/month.
• ClickFunnels: ClickFunnels costs $97 – $2,497/month.

Ability to Scale Your Online Business

• SamCart: SamCart offers an excellent “Enterprise” plan for mobility and flexibility as your business grows.
• ClickFunnels: ClickFunnels offers a “Two Comma Club X” plan that allows businesses to experience unlimited growth. 

Shopping Cart Design and Checkout Pages

• SamCart: SamCart is a dedicated shopping cart platform that offers a more advanced shopping cart design and checkout pages mechanism, including cart abandonment and management.

• ClickFunnels: ClickFunnels shopping cart design isn’t as advanced as SamCart’s

Payment Integrations for Your Checkout Page

• SamCart: SamCart offers support for mobile payments like Apple Pay and Google Pay for different checkout pages.
• ClickFunnels: ClickFunnels all-in-one tool for checkout platform that connects to up to 27 payment gateways through third-party integrations for your checkout page.

Memberships

• SamCart: SamCart offers robust membership integrations with many of the top platforms, including OptimizePress and MemberMouse for the Membership funnel and checkout page
• ClickFunnels: ClickFunnels allows you to build effective membership funnels within the dashboard.

Email Marketing Automation Tools

• SamCart: SamCart offers email marketing through third-party integrations. 
• ClickFunnels: ClickFunnels has built-in email marketing functionality and an autoresponder that makes sending follow-up sequences and split testing easy.

There are a few other differences between these two platforms. For instance, ClickFunnels offers A/B split testing in its beginner plan, whereas SamCart doesn’t. 

Another difference (aside from split testing) is the sales funnel builder. While ClickFunnels focuses more on creating optimized pages and building high-converting sales funnels, SamCart is a standalone shopping cart tool to help eCommerce stores accept orders.

In other words, SamCart is only effective when used for eCommerce companies. In contrast, ClickFunnels lets you build different online businesses, making it a more versatile tool for anyone looking to sell products or services online.

Listing Products

How you list your products and services on your shopping cart platform can make a huge difference to the results you get from your marketing and product sales process and campaigns.

You want to pick the software that helps you build beautiful landing pages, showcase your products, and optimize your sales process. 

Here’s what you can list on each platform and a detailed look at how the listing process works.

SamCart:

SamCart has an excellent mechanism for selling and delivering digital products. To list your product on SamCart, you have to log on to the platform and click “New Products” on your dashboard. Enter the essential details, such as:

• Name of product
• Price
• Description

You can then choose the product type and upload an image. Select the payment type you want to use (one-off payment, recurring weekly, recurring monthly, etc.) You can also set discounts and coupons.

Additionally, SamCart offers a diverse range of eCommerce tools beyond listing your products. These include CRM integrations, partial refunds, monthly subscriptions, and more.

ClickFunnels:

Setting up a product on ClickFunnels is easy. First, go to “Product Details,” where you will be able to name your product, price it, and use other features, such as the bump feature, quantity limits, etc. 

But, before you can do all this, you must first create a product, order form, and payment gateway, and ClickFunnels has the training to help with that.

Winner: ClickFunnels

SamCart’s features are simple, well-organized, and extremely easy to use. But, compared to ClickFunnels, SamCart’s platform lacks certain areas.

Design Customization

When it comes to building and customizing pages, you need a straightforward process. The last thing you want is to spend hours figuring out how the different elements of the page builder work.

That’s usually something you have to do within website builders; not a platform focused more on funnels and conversions.

So, take a look at what each platform offers to decide which one makes it easier to build high-quality pages.

SamCart:

SamCart has powerful checkout page templates that are more advanced than ClickFunnels. 

The platform also comes with order bumps and one-click checkout pages similar to ClickFunnels. 

However, SamCart is focused on one area: shopping cart pages and checkout pages, which makes it unsuited for many users other than those building eCommerce websites.

You can either build a page from scratch or use one of the many built-in templates to make your work easier on the platform.

The image above shows the platform’s intuitive page editor with neatly arranged features, including content, collections, and settings. 

The content tab contains all the different elements and widgets, including headlines, text, images, dividers, videos, icons, and buttons.

With the drag and drop editor, you can easily drag the elements onto the page and arrange them any way you like.

The collections tab contains block features for the header area, featured area, call to action, and guarantees.

The settings tab is where you can customize your fonts, page style, and checkout form. It’s also where you will find your saved templates.

A feature that helps SamCart stand out from ClickFunnels, ThriveCart, and its other competitors is its massive range of multistep forms, full-width forms, pop-up templates, and more. 

Depending on your needs, you can choose a template that will require minimal customization.

For instance, the one-page funnel concept sends visitors to a specially designed page that convinces customers to purchase the product online by highlighting its features and benefits. 

It also has integrated checkout pages embedded into the software to reduce the chance of customer abandonment with click-throughs to a different page, such as another checkout page.

This simple one-page funnel takes away the need to build long, fancy sales funnel pages that often don’t convert.

ClickFunnels:

ClickFunnels has a lot more customization options compared to SamCart. As a result, it has more features and appeals to a much wider audience. 

Its page builder is just as user-friendly as SamCart, and there are no distracting sidebars. The features are logically arranged to help you save time searching for the elements you need for your checkout pages, landing page, and affiliate accounts.

Additionally, drag-and-drop builder functionality makes it easy to create your site with no coding experience.

There is a very short learning curve, and once you have that down, you’ll find that ClickFunnels’ process for building upsell pages, order pages, landing pages, pop-ups, sales funnel creation, and other webpages are a lot simpler and faster than SamCart since the platform automatically loads the mockup when you add the image of your product when you sell products online. 

Once you’ve created your pages, you can A/B test them to find the best-performing page. 

Although SamCart also offers this feature, it’s only available in the highest plan, which costs $199/month. Furthermore, SamCart lacks many digital marketing automation features that are native to ClickFunnels.

Bottom line, ClickFunnels gives you a ton of control over how your pages look. You can change the fonts, colors, images, and every other element in your sales funnel to look precisely how you want it.

Winner: ClickFunnels

The winner here is ClickFunnels, thanks to its powerful page builder, which comes with tons of features (such as A/B testing) available with all the paid plans.

Sales Funnels

A sales funnel simply the process through which you lead potential customers from the moment they learn about you to when they ultimately decide whether or not to purchase your product or service. 

With the right funnel software, you can effectively drive your business objectives, such as:

• Selling products
• Building your list
• Getting membership sign-ups
• Attracting webinar attendees

… and much more.

That’s why it’s crucial to choose software that allows you to build quality, high converting funnels. 

If you already have a funnel system in place, this factor may not influence your decision on which is better, SamCart or ClickFunnels.

But if not, read on to see which platform has the better features for sales funnels. 

SamCart:

SamCart’s funnel-building process is a lot less advanced than ClickFunnels. It only has a few basic funnel features. 

That’s because ClickFunnels put its primary focus on building the entire sales funnel, as opposed to simply providing shopping cart software, as SamCart does.

The only way it would make sense to choose SamCart over ClickFunnels would be if you already have the software for building funnels. 

Without it, you may find SamCart’s features severely lacking in this regard.

ClickFunnels:

ClickFunnels’ process for building funnels is a lot more advanced than the one offered by SamCart. 

The platform is a website builder that does more than just build pages. It builds intelligent sales funnels that convert. This is one of the most powerful ClickFunnels features.

The types of funnels you can build include:

• Sales funnels
• Followup Funnels
• Webinar Funnels
• Membership Site Funnels
• Leads Funnels or Opt-in Funnels
• Launch Funnels
• Tripwire Funnels 

Launch funnels can be used to launch new products or services and create tons of marketing buzz around the offer.

Tripwire funnels are used for attracting customers by selling products at extremely low prices – often with a loss.

You can use a click funnel to create any type of funnel you want. This can be as simple as a two-page funnel for collecting emails and displaying a thank you page.

Or, it could be as complex as full-blown membership sites funnel that entices people to sign up for your offer so you can earn recurring income.

The most commonly used funnel is a sales page funnel, where you explain your product or service and then sell it using a series of upsells and downsells.

Best of all, ClickFunnels offers ready-made funnels that you can choose from, making it that much easier for you to get up and running with a battle-tested, professionally-built funnel template.

With all of these funnels, you can test a diverse range of sales process strategies to determine how best to increase sales and decrease shopping cart abandonment.

Winner: ClickFunnels

The winner here is ClickFunnels, as the platform offers dedicated software for building a wide range of effective funnels.

Additional Marketing Capabilities

Both ClickFunnels and SamCart offer features such as one-click and mobile-friendly checkout, bump offers, upsells, and downsells to help you maximize your revenue. 

However, neither platform has behavioral adaptive marketing features or dynamic OTOs. 

These are features that platforms like Kartra offer, and they allow you to offer products to customers based on their previous purchases or behavior on your website. In this section of the SamCart vs. ClickFunnels comparison, we’ll be taking a look at their additional marketing capabilities.

SamCart:

SamCart is a dedicated shopping cart and checkout process management software, so it’s no surprise that it comes with additional features like one-click upsells, abandoned cart mitigation features, coupons, and post-purchase one-click upsell pages, and much more. 

Although SamCart doesn’t have built-in email marketing features, you can use external third-party integrations, such as Aweber, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, and more to help you send emails and follow-up sequences to customers.

ClickFunnels:

ClickFunnels has a checkout platform, pop-ups, bump offers, a one-click upsell feature, and down sells. 

Clickfunnels features also have a feature for email and marketing automation called “Actionetics,” which can be used to create follow-up funnels without additional cost. 

Actionetics is a sequential builder that allows you to send follow-up emails to your customers, and you can also arrange the leads in your list with proper tags to make it easier for you to segment your contacts.

If you need to send broadcast emails, you can use any of the dozens of email marketing software integrations on ClickFunnels to send broadcast emails.

However, ClickFunnels’ email builder does lack the visual automation builder like the ones you find on other funnel building software options like Kartra

Winner: ClickFunnels

SamCart excels as a dedicated platform for shopping cart and checkout management. It has all the features you need to increase your revenue per sale and your customer lifetime value. 

However, ClickFunnels takes the cup because it comes with separate email marketing software. 

However, it’s important to note that this software is only available on the $297/month plan. If using a lower plan, you can still integrate with your choice of dozens of popular autoresponders.

Affiliate Program Management

If you plan to use affiliates, you should pick a platform with the right affiliate management system. 

Luckily, both ClickFunnels and SamCart have affiliate management features. 

Let’s see how each affiliate management system stacks up against the other.

SamCart:

The affiliate management setup on SamCart is simple and easy for beginners to understand. 

On your dashboard, you can enable or disable affiliates for different products. You can also see total affiliate earnings and a breakdown of all important affiliate metrics.

One disadvantage is that this feature is only available with SamCart’s highest-priced plan, so if you want to access the feature, you’ll have to sign up for the “Scale” plan, which costs $199/month. 

However, if you rely on affiliate income in your business, this is a feature worth paying for. 

With the premium subscription, you get access to the affiliate center, which allows you to recruit an army of affiliates who can sell your products and services for you. 

This is an inexpensive way to generate high amounts of revenue, especially if you provide attractive remuneration for the affiliates.

ClickFunnels:

ClickFunnels has a “Backpack” feature for the creation of affiliate programs. Unfortunately, this feature is not available on the lower plans, which means that if you want to work with affiliates, you have to sign up for the higher-priced plan, which costs $297/month. 

One unique advantage of the ClickFunnels affiliate management feature is its sticky cookies that recognize and track customers who previously completed a transaction from that affiliate link. 

This allows your affiliates to earn recurring commissions for other products purchased by that same customer. 

This feature is unique to ClickFunnels, and it’s one of the main reasons an online seller might choose this platform over SamCart. 

The platform also allows you to do a lot more, including:

• Create two-tier affiliate programs
• Manage affiliate payments from one dashboard with the affiliate center
• Run contests for affiliates

… and so much more.

Winner: ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels offers a better affiliate management program. Although the feature is only available with the platinum plan at $297/month, it certainly can be worth it for you if the bulk of your income comes from affiliates. 

Integrations

SamCart vs. ClickFunnels in Integrations. It is one of the most important factors to consider before choosing which software is ideal for your business. 

You need to choose a platform that can integrate easily with all the other marketing apps and tools in your tech stack.

Luckily, both SamCart and ClickFunnels come with Zapier integration, allowing you to connect to all your favorite services and apps if they aren’t supported natively.

Read on to see what types of native integrations each platform offers.

Important Note: I update this list as much as possible, and I’ve also linked to the different pages on the respective platforms where you can get more information on the integrations.

SamCart:

SamCart integrations include: 

• Payment Providers: PayPal, Stripe, Braintree
• Email Marketing Providers: Email marketing tools like MailChimp, Drip, iContact, MaroPost, Hubspot, Ontraport
• Membership Platforms: Thinkific, MemberMouse, OptimizeMember, Kajabi
• Fulfillment Services: ShipStation and other integrations through Zapier
• Webinar Platforms: Kajabi and various other integrations via Zapier 

SamCart also has a valuable sandbox mode that allows you to make sure everything is working properly before taking your product funnels live.

You can also make test payments in Stripe, and these won’t show in your stats. But, again, this is a convenient feature that ClickFunnels doesn’t have.

You can find out more about SamCart integrations here.

ClickFunnels:

ClickFunnels offers many integrations with a lot of the leading third-party platforms. 

They have a lot more options compared to SamCart, including:

• Payment Providers: PayPal, Stripe, Apple/Android Pay, Authorize.net, EasyPayDirect
• Email Marketing Providers: Email marketing tools like MailChimp, Drip, MadMimi, GetResponse, Ontraport
• Membership Platforms: Kajabi, Thinkific,MemberMouse, OptimizeMember
• Webinar Platforms: Kajabi and other integrations through Zapier 
• Fulfillment Services: ShipStation and some other integrations via Zapier

ClickFunnels integrates with Shopify, Clickbank, and many more payment gateways, marketing automation software, checkout page, and autoresponders. You can also incorporate ClickFunnels into WordPress to seamlessly build your eCommerce website.

Winner: ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels is the clear winner in this category based on the sheer number of integrations available.

Pricing

In terms of SamCart vs. ClickFunnels pricing, obviously, this is an important factor to consider before choosing which shopping cart platform that’s best for your business. 

Below, we take a look at what the different pricing plans offer so you can make sure you’re getting total value for money.

SamCart:

SamCart offers a 14-day free trial. After that, pricing starts at $49/month, And there are many different tiers: 

• Launch ($49/month): Ideal for launching your business. You can create a one-page website for showcasing your products online.
• Grow ($99/month): This is SamCart’s most popular package, and it allows you to convert more visitors into customers and use tactics like bump orders, and post-purchase one-click upsells to increase the value of each transaction.
• Scale ($199/month): The Scale plan has everything your eCommerce business needs to sell at scale. It also has built-in A/B testing, cart abandonment, and an affiliate center.

ClickFunnels:

Like SamCart, ClickFunnels also offers a 14-day free trial, and both these platforms require you to insert your credit card information to use the trial. However, the pricing between the two is very different. Pricing for ClickFunnels starts at $97/month, and the various plans are as follows:

• ClickFunnels ($97/month): This is ClickFunnels’ basic plan includes everything you need to build and share up to 100 pages and 20 sales funnels. This plan also consists of three domains and three payment gateways.
• ClickFunnels Platinum ($297/month): Formally called the Etison Suite plan, this plan comes with unlimited funnels and pages (even with conversion-optimized checkout pages, upsell pages, landing page, and sales funnels), nine payment gateways, and nine domains. You can also build unlimited follow-up funnels and get priority chat support.
• Two Comma Club X ($2497/month): This plan is designed for businesses that want to sell at scale. It has unlimited funnels and pages, 27 payment gateways, and 27 domains. It also includes priority support via chat and phone and hours of additional training for maximizing your sales.

Winner: SamCart

While both offer 14-day free trials, SamCart is cheaper than ClickFunnels at all pricing tiers. Although ClickFunnels offers a lot more features in building pages and funnels (sales funnel, upsell pages, the landing page that is perfect for online business owners), if you already have a funnel in place, this platform may seem overkill. 

Also, being an all-in-one platform sometimes comes with some disadvantages, such as being unable to excel in any area. And since SamCart is a dedicated shopping cart software, it can provide the best service in this regard.

Reporting

SamCart vs. ClickFunnels in Reporting. As a marketer, you understand the importance of choosing a shopping cart platform with strong reporting capabilities so that you can track, analyze, and optimize your sales data. 

Let’s look at how these two platforms compare in this area.

SamCart:

SamCart’s reporting features are not available on the basic plan. But, once you upgrade to the higher tiers, you’ll be able to see all the information you need to keep track of your conversions and sales.

The reports are organized by product, date, subscription, traffic, and upsell funnels. 

Exporting reports is quick and easy, and you can either get them as CSV files or opt for more in-depth sales reports.

SamCart offers the following reports on the “Grow” and “Scale” plans:

• Subscription Report: Get insights about the performance of your subscriptions, free trial, payment plans, and more.
• Charges Report: This report is located in the “Activity” drop-down, and it will allow you to track all your charges, where they originated, and which ones you are scheduled to collect.
• Traffic Report: The traffic report allows you to discover where your sales are. It shows you a referrer’s table and a UTM table that will enable you to track any UTM codes that you collect on your pages.

ClickFunnels:

ClickFunnels offers detailed analytics reports that are easy to read. The platform provides in-depth insights on various metrics, including orders, conversion rates, and much more.

The other great thing about ClickFunnels is that as soon as your sales funnels are live, you can monitor the performance of each one using simple tools on the platform. 

For instance, you can see:

• How many visitors landed on your page
• How many converted by making a purchase
• What percentage opted into your email marketing list

…and so on. 

And, with ClickFunnels’ built-in A/B testing feature, you can fine-tune your headlines, copy, images, and calls to action to get better results from your marketing campaigns.

Winner: SamCart

While ClickFunnels offers more in-depth reporting, SamCart’s reporting dashboard is more straightforward to understand, making it the better alternative for beginners.

However, for more experienced marketers, ClickFunnels may be more appealing since it offers more advanced reports and analytics features.

Final Thoughts

That’s the end of my SamCart vs. ClickFunnels review. I hope by now you have a clear idea of which platform is best for your business. 

If not, let me simplify things for you.

Choose SamCart if:

You are an entrepreneur who already has a funnel-building system and an email marketing platform in place. You are looking for a reliable shopping cart and checkout management tool to help you start accepting orders (with order pages) online in the easiest way possible.

Choose ClickFunnels if:

You want an affordable, all-in-one platform with all the tools and strategies to help you sell products, services, and memberships in one convenient place.

You can read my total reviews on SamCart and ClickFunnels here:

Full Samcart review, Samcart alternatives, and ClickFunnels alternatives if you need them.

The bottom line is that both of these platforms are high-quality, viable options for you as an online seller. You won’t go wrong with either one, as long as it fits the specific needs of your business, whether you are selling virtual services or physical products.